


Imagining My Man

by th_esaurus



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Consent Issues, F/M, Sex Pollen, Unhappy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-01
Updated: 2018-07-01
Packaged: 2019-05-31 20:23:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15127160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: He would have died, Shuri tells herself, firmly and often.





	Imagining My Man

**Author's Note:**

> lizzen and i have been talking about a shuri/bucky sex pollen fic for months and i finally had a go at writing it and, you know, it could have been sexy and fun and instead i went full-throttle misery as per usual.

There is, in the rare sunless spaces of Wakanda, a heart-shaped herb that can give a man unfathomable strength and stamina. Super-human abilities, one might say. 

Is it such a stretch to believe there is fauna, in that ancient, fathomless earth, that could affect a man in--

\--baser ways?

*

Shuri finds him foetal and shivering at the mouth of the little camp, two goats snuffling half-interested at the back of his drenched neck, his kimoyo beads pulsing a mild beacon. A last resort call for help, no immediate alarm, that he must have put off sending until, truly, he realised he was dying.

“Bucky--” she says, his name almost a cuss from her mouth. He’s too far gone to answer. Shaking all over, sweating to match, his clothes are a patchwork of damp and tear-marks where he’d tried to claw them off his broiling chest and couldn’t find enough coordination to do the simplest thing. His lips are dry and crackling, his eyes red, rolled almost fully back; his khakis are a stained mess, almost viscous with his come. 

She is not shocked. She is nineteen, and she knows the pitfalls of her homeland. 

Better by far than Bucky does.

*

A vaccine was always low on the list of priorities, for a plant that was rare to stumble across in the wilds and had, besides, a natural cure. Not an old wives’ tale like sucking venom from a snake-bite, but a failsafe antidote. Not ideal, not painless. 

But she knows it will work.

*

She drags him bodily into the hut for a modicum of privacy, angrily shooing the goats. He is thick with muscle and listless and lucid enough to be ashamed that he cannot not help her, but Shuri cares little for his pride and more for his life. “We’ll do it quick,” she says, because she knows he’ll remember her words afterwards. He is sedate but conscious, and memory is a sticky creature. “It’s a good thing I find you pretty, Sergeant Barnes.”

Shuri chides herself for joking; a defense mechanism.

At least there’s truth in it.

*

She recalls a conversation with Steve Rogers. He was so upright that she loved to rile him, loved to make him huff a little breath of laughter through his nose. “He’s handsome, no?” she said, needling him easily.

She had seen old photographs of them, nothing posed, just the two of them spotted by historians in the background of a funfair snapshot. Bucky, tall, a crooked grin, clean-shaven, bright-eyed, his hair a little longer than strict military regulation; a personal vanity. The skinny whippet of a boy by his side, in his shadow, must have been Steve. 

Rogers’ smile was sad. “He used to be. Before the world got to him.”

*

The noise Bucky makes when Shuri pulls down his khakis and bares his wet cock to the air is a sad thing, the angry hiss of pain let rip half a second after a burn. It makes Shuri kiss him, sweetly on his panting mouth, and that’s what embarrasses her more than anything else. Like putting medicine on a sugar cube. “Hush,” she orders, unwrapping the loose cloth sling from his shoulders. He had not wanted to keep the arm. Not after--

He had decided not to keep the arm, when he came back to settle in Wakanda.

“Hush now,” Shuri tells him.

“Don’t do this,” he gasps, a hurting groan.

“You’ll die,” Shuri says, the truth, and kisses him again. Pulls his head to hers and holds him there until the closeness of her body and the wetness of her tongue send a shuddering calm through him.

Shuri has known him for three years now, and has thought a little about kissing him in that time.  _ Who wouldn’t? _ she thinks, defensive.

She has no doubt that he’s harboured no such thoughts about her.

*

The herb has no name in English, but is a distant relative to the ginkgo: a milder aphrodisiac can be boiled slowly from the tasteless root, but only in winter, when the plant is dormant. In flower, it is a dangerous thing. High stamen that catch the lightest breeze, and a careless whiff of pollen is enough to bring down the strongest Jabari: increased bloodflow to the extremities, a resulting lightheadedness, feverish flushes. The tidal drift in circulation is so severe that, if not seen to within hours, the brain literally starves.

Shuri remembers giggling as her biology tutor cooly rattled off the details. She could not help but laugh out loud at  _ engorged penis or vulva _ , and her tutor, with a snap, had barked, “It is no laughing matter, highness.”

Only a matter of life or death.

*

She slept with a boy, once, and very recently. A young man who worked in med-sci department at her old academy; years of private tutors made Shuri eager for friendship, and he was handsome, serious and patriotic in the way most Borderland youths are. 

He called her  _ Shuri _ before they fooled around, and  _ your highness _ after. He seemed to think he had made a mistake. 

*

Bucky comes with a noisy kind of anguish as she kisses him. It must be the third, at least, or fourth time he’s orgasmed since his exposure, and he looks exhausted, wet-eyed and ashamed. His heavy muscles are tense all over, and he pants a repeated apology into her mouth, pushes her away, too weak for a man of such strength. 

It strikes her that he has some of the same weariness now as when he fights. His body a lumbering weapon he cannot quite control, his eyes sorrowful and resigned. She strokes her palms softly down both sides of his jaw, and his stubble prickles her skin, but she is determined to be gentle.

“Lie yourself down, Bucky,” she says, making sure to smile for him.

“Don’t, don’t do this--”

“It won’t take long.” 

Shuri kisses the tip of his nose, fond, and his mouth again, and he sways forward, chasing her warmth even as his fever rages. 

He lies back heavily, and looks away when she sheds her dress. Looks at the ceiling, and then closes his eyes, and then presses the heels of his palms into his shut eyelids as though even the scant light seeping through the thin skin is painful.

Shuri takes one of his wrists and places his shaking hand on her knee as she seats herself above him, between his trembling thighs. His cock is slick enough from amassed come and she is, in truth, a little wet. 

She knows she is slim, and bony in places he can reach, and she presses his palm into her skin so he can feel it. 

“Think of Steve Rogers,” Shuri tells him kindly. 

*

Captain Rogers is buried in Brooklyn. There is a public memorial near his childhood apartment, but his grave is unmarked for privacy, behind an Irish Catholic church a few plots away from his mother. 

Bucky has the use of Wakanda’s jets any time he would like to visit, T’Challa told him. 

Shuri had been to the funeral, and had gone with him to the grave, a few times.

He was very quiet, and she held his hand and did not look away when he cried. She felt that someone owed to it him, after all these years, to acknowledge his grief. But Bucky was of a different age, a different culture, and he wiped his eyes on his single sleeve, and did not talk about it afterwards.

*

Shuri wonders if there might be something in that Western propensity to leave things unspoken.

She never tells him how much she likes the thick feeling of his cock inside her.

*

There is a lake close by to the camp. The goats are disgruntled at having been abandoned most of the afternoon, only dry grass to graze on instead of their usual fresh hay. Shuri pads barefoot through them, lets them sniff at her empty hands, though she can only offer a rough pet and none of the jackfruit flesh she knows Bucky gives them as a treat sometimes. 

He is soft with them. 

Shuri washes in the lake at her leisure. Goes into the water waist deep and sluices it between her legs, under her breasts. He had gotten mad with it, when he was close to coming inside her, and grabbed at her skin, his bitten-short nails scraping low on her back, his mouth and teeth bruising her chest, some reserve of energy swelling up from his hips as he pinned her on his cock and took and took and took.

All the while he was shedding tears.

Did he know it was her, in that final ravage? Or was he thinking of--?

Shuri had covered him with a thin hessian blanket and let him sleep once they were done. She stayed by his side, rubbing her hand absently through his damp hair until his shudders began to subside.

She floats on the lake’s surface for a little while, her arms outstretched like an autumn leaf, pushing herself in lazy circles with her paddling feet. The sun is a balm on her tender skin. 

It’s half an hour or more before she sighs and finds her footing on the shifting lakebed. Trudges carefully back to shore. 

She brings a pail of water back with her. Not used to fetching and carrying, but she has tender her brother’s wounds more than once. She knows how to clean blood; Bucky’s come won’t be much different. 

*

There was one photograph in the Met’s archives: 1937, Bucky’s slicked back hair and wide collar, one arm slung around Steve’s scrawny shoulders, and the other holding a burning cigarette as far away from Steve as Bucky could manage. His smoky grin; Steve’s scowling disapproval.

There are cigarettes in the back-alley markets in Wakanda’s suburbs, Shuri knows, and she thinks about sneaking out to buy a carton for Bucky. In case he might need--

Something post-coital--

Shuri tuts aloud at herself over the cliche of it all.

*

After the funeral, not wanting Bucky to stray too far from her side, Shuri had overheard him murmuring with Wilson, low in their grief. “I’m so fucking sorry,” Wilson had said. “Jesus. You two went through--too much. I know you were--I mean, I know what you guys meant to each other.”

“I wish _ I  _ knew,” Bucky had replied.

He sounded so small, and so lost. 

*

Shuri sits, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders and bundled in her waist for some modesty, while Bucky busies himself building a campfire for the evening. He has dressed, but walks painfully, as though his skin is still freshly burnt. He has stopped sweating, and his cheeks are only flushed from the afternoon warmth, nothing more sinister. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, after a very long time. He can’t look at her. Only the kindling in his hands.

“There is nothing to be sorry for,” Shuri says, earnestly. She shows him a holo of that vicious herb with her beads, so he’ll know the signs. “It’s a rare beast, and you were unfortunate.”

“It shouldn’t have been you,” Bucky murmurs, barely listening.

It was a problem to solve. A wound that she bandaged. She wishes he could see it that way, but doesn’t voice the thought.

They lapse into unhappy silence again. He can only pretend to fetch firewood for so long. Eventually he sits close enough that she can offer her hand to him. He takes it, but does not hold it. Squeezes it once, and then lets it drop.

It seems like he’s figuring out how to phrase something difficult.

“You don’t have to--I mean, there’s no risk of--” he speaks like there are marbles in his mouth when he’s this uncomfortable. A short breath, short sentences. “Whatever they did, to make me. It made me--Useless.”

“Sterile?”

“Yeah.”

He looks away, deeply unsettled. 

Shuri had liked when he came inside her. A heated, full sort of feeling that had made her drag her top lip between her teeth and clench her thighs around his waist. 

She doesn’t mention this.

She feels certain they will not mention any of this at all.

*

Bucky, in time, talks of Steve Rogers to her less and less; and she does not go with him again to that unmarked grave.

*

Uncertainty is not something that comes naturally to her. He would have died, Shuri tells herself, firmly and often. 

It’s true.

*

It’s true, yes, but--


End file.
